[MUD-Dev] Unique items vs. item references

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Bruce Mitchener wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

>> Varying quantities isn't interesting.  "Rare" weapons should do
>> qualitatively different things.  Like leap out of your hand and
>> make perfect "X" incisions in your enemy's skull, causing their
>> 3D geometry to fall apart in a highly specific way.  Oh, you
>> can't do this in Diablo II?  Well, Diablo II isn't all that
>> interesting of a game, so there.

> How would you handle a the analogous problem in your game?

I'm not currently trying to make a CRPG.  If I were, I wouldn't
necessarily try to make a story driven game.  Let's be clear that I
consider "story" a completely different issue than what we're
discussing in this thread, "unique item powers."  I think it's
perfectly reasonable to make a game that's only about hacking
monsters and leveling up, *if* you are determined to make it an
interesting experience at every moment for the player.  Most games
don't have that design goal, they just flip over counters endlessly.

Diablo II sets an exceedingly low bar for what people are willing to
buy.  Plenty of people like repetitive play mechanics, it's
profitable.  I would endeavor to do better.  I believe you can make
plenty of profit, offer the mainstream what they want, without being
tediously repetitive.  It will cost you more game design and content
production time, because you have to make many more unique items
with unique implications for gameplay.  I don't see that as a
particularly radical business proposition however.  We're not
talking about far out R&D stuff here.  The real bottleneck is a good
game designer, or team of them, who can keep firm control over the
project's evolution of content.  So many game projects get lost in
utterly irrelevant content, the Game Developer postmortems are full
of such horror stories.

> What is your vision for your game?  What sorts of considerations
> would you have when designing your items and the overall item
> system?

My vision for *all* games I am currently working on, or have ever
contemplated working on, is to compress the fun value of various
genres into much smaller periods of time.  I do not believe in 24+
hour Civilization games, nor 1 week Diablo II level-up fests.  I
believe these curves of gratification can be achieved in 5..8 hours
and the rest is just boring repetitive filler crap.

I'm 32 years old.  I want to have a blast and get it over with, so I
can get on with my life.  I don't have the free time of a teenager
or college student anymore.

> Do you have a system in mind to allow you to readily (and easily)
> create special effects such as you described?

That's a 3D engine question.  Do whatever you like with your 3D
engines, where there's a will there's a way.  If you want paradigms
for designing engines of any sort, the theme in all the Game
Developer postmortems seems to be: we want engines that allow
content guys to make changes without elaborate check-in cycles.
When you make a change, you shouldn't be cowering in fear that it's
going to break something, and you shouldn't have to go through 100
tedious steps to actually get the new content viewable in the game.
Design the system with immediate artist feedback in mind.

> On another note, it'd be interesting to hear your strategy for
> doing play testing and balancing in a system where the effects of
> rare items are fairly unique and customized for each item.

For bug testing, you try to make the underlying engine robust, and
you try to fix problems at that level, so that people can author
stuff without fear.  You *don't* try to reinvent the wheel with a
zillion new technologies like novel scripting languages and 3D
engine approaches and nifty database paradigms and all the other
wheels that programmers just love to reinvent.  You pick a small
number of things that are going to be developed as "new" technology,
and the rest needs to come off-the-shelf from somewhere.  For
instance, Python may not be the ideal scripting language, but you
make a decision to use it.  The only way you're going to get stable
technology is if you *deliberately choose* to design very little of
it.  So that it can be tested, so that it can mature, and so you're
not always twiddling with the basic technology.

For play testing, if it doesn't crash then you're getting into the
philosophical.  Suggestion: make sure you're at the top of the food
chain.  Make sure you can force your game design decisions down
other people's throats if need be.  Really!  Design your whole
career around gaining your creative freedom and authority.
Otherwise, you're always going to be griping about the inevitable
tussle of Person A thinks it's balanced, Person B does not.


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.


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